SnowSlider - Blogging From the mountains by ise

Mont Chevreuil is an abandoned ski station near to Château-d’Oex and was once on the same lift pass. The lift runs up from Rossiniere, or used to as it’s not run all the time I’ve lived here despite what some UK ski web sites appear to think according to their “in depth” guides to Château-d’Oex. Anyway, we had left the car in the Col des Mosses at La Lecherette and walked in to Mont Chevreuil from there. It’s a great time of year for walking and the conditions alter so much, earlier in the week I was in shirtsleeves enjoying the sunshine in Kandersteg and today we’re in early season snow. We’d thrown snow chains and snow shoes into the car as a precaution but didn’t really need them. You could have snow shoed at the top and the higher parts of the descent would have been fun but there’s not enough snow yet to need this kind of kit.


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L’Etivaz is a small village on the on the col des Mosses and famed for it’s cheese. They make the cheese up at the alpages which are high altitude milking parlours, farmers spend the summer up at these alpages and you’ll find them every few kilometres. The cheese is then matured in caves down in the valley for around seven months. There’s a shop in the village that’s open on a Sunday so we didn’t take a sandwich with us, instead we bought some L’Etivaz cheese and some bread to make a picnic.

Our route was to follow the L’Eau Froide stream up the valley climbing up around 1900m. From there we would drop down into the valley of the Torneresse and back to L’Etivaz.


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We’ve just bought ourselves some new snowshoes, we both have new pairs of Inook raquettes, the Odyssey for me and the Odalys for Julie basically the mens/womens versions of the same raquette.

Today was the first chance to use them and Col Des Mosses looked the place to go, the snowfall from a few weeks ago needs a refresh so anywhere low isn’t really good and there are trails at Col Des Mosses starting from 1400m and rising to 1750m which I thought would give good snow cover and that turned out right. It was a bit thin in the trees at a couple of points but the beauty of raquettes is that you can leave them on and not damage them like skis.


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We’d walked up to Lac Lioson (Col des Mosses) at the end of November last year and it had been really nice in the snow. Being winter though we’d had to take a shorter route as the days are short and an ascent of Pic Chaussy at 2350m wasn’t practical. Lac Lioson is at 1850m and in the summer the cabane is open serving lunch so after walking up from Les Mosses I took some lunch at their and saved my picnic for the summit later.

Les Mosses is down at 1400m or so so it’s already 400m (1300ft) ascent to Lac Lioson before climbing Pic Chaussy, some people park up at Lioson d’en Bas at around 1600m which lops a handy couple of hundred metres from the ascent but I wanted to climb Pic Chaussy, traverse the ridge and make more of a circuit so I left the car in Les Mosses.

For Google Earth : 2007 06 24 KML file

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